Meet Me in St. Louis
The Dream of White Supremacy
Meet Me in St. Louis premiered on November 22, 1944, in St. Louis, Missouri. The New York premiere took place a few days later, on November 28. It was the first hit from MGM’s musical department, headed since 1940 by Arthur Freed, the writer of some of the best-known songs in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, who would go on to produce some of the most memorable films of those decades as well. It was Arthur Freed who acquired the copyrights to a series of stories by author Sally Benson, then published in the prestigious magazine The New Yorker. The stories are about Sally Benson’s childhood in a white, middle-class family, the Smiths, living in St. Louis in 1903, as they looked forward to the major event that would take place in that city the following year: the 1904 World’s Fair. It is said that Freed told the powerful head of MGM at the time, Louis B. Mayer:
“I want to make this into the most delightful piece of Americana ever.”
In fact, the film became one of the biggest hits of the 1940s, influencing all subsequent musicals and ushering in MGM’s Golden Age of musicals, which would last until the 1960s.
Meet Me in St. Louis was also the film that launched the career of the then virtually unknown director Vincente Minnelli, who would go on to direct other great MGM musicals, such as Gigi and An American in Paris. And it was during filming that Vincente Minnelli fell in love with the film’s leading lady, Judy Garland. The two married in 1945 and had a daughter: Liza Minnelli.
Critics were virtually unanimous in their praise. TIME magazine wrote: “The real love story is between a happy family and a way of living.”
Manny Farber, whom Susan Sontag considered “the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country has ever produced”, wrote that Minnelli’s work “in Meet Me in St. Louis indicates that he is the most human, skillful director to appear in Hollywood in years.”
Woody Allen has stated that Meet Me in St. Louis is one of his three favorite musicals, alongside Gigi and Singing in the Rain.
In 1994, due to its cultural and historical significance, Meet Me in St. Louis was selected for preservation in the U.S. Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
However, there is something striking about this film if we pay attention to what is missing: there are no African Americans in the film; they do not even appear as mere passersby in the outdoor scenes. The St. Louis depicted in the film is an entirely white city.
Ignoring the African American population was a common practice in Hollywood during that period. However, St. Louis has a particularly violent history of control, removal, and exclusion of African Americans. It also has a rich history of resistance and solidarity within the African American community in the fight against racism in its various forms. By depicting a St. Louis without African Americans, the film Meet Me in St. Louis realizes—at least on the big screen—the dream of white supremacy.
Violence and Exclusion in St. Louis
In late 1818, the Missouri legislature petitioned the U.S. Congress for admission as the twenty-fourth state of the Union. At the time, some members of Congress—notably New York Representative James Tallmadge—argued that Missouri could only be admitted to the Union if it abolished slavery within its borders. The powerful slaveholding elite would never accept this condition, and ultimately Congress agreed to a compromise—known as the Missouri Compromise—under which Missouri would remain a slave state and the state of Maine would be admitted as a “free state,” where slavery would not be permitted. A dividing line was drawn at the 36° 30’ parallel, the southern border of Missouri, creating the well-known division between the North and the South of the United States that would endure until the Civil War. Missouri’s 1820 constitution explicitly sought to “prevent free negroes and mulattoes from coming to and settling in this State, under any pretext whatsoever.”
It marked the beginning of a process to remove the free African American population from the territory of Missouri, including the city of St. Louis.
Slavery in Missouri was particularly violent. William Wells Brown, a former slave and author of a famous autobiography— Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave—published in 1849, experienced the violence of the slave-owning class firsthand in the city of St. Louis and denounced it as follows:
“Though slavery is thought, by some, to be mild in Missouri, when compared with the cotton, sugar and rice growing States, yet no part of our slave-holding country, is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants, than St. Louis. It was here that Col. Harney, a United States officer, whipped a slave woman to death. It was here that Francis McIntosh, a free colored man from Pittsburgh, was taken from the steamboat Flora, and burned at the stake. During a residence of eight years in this city, numerous cases of extreme cruelty came under my own observation (…).”
William Wells Brown, in addition to recounting the instances of extreme violence against enslaved people that he witnessed, also denounced the social injustices and the physical and emotional wounds caused by slavery—not only among the enslaved themselves but throughout society. A slave-owning society is always a deeply sick and enormously violent society. His autobiography became an international success, and while living in London, William Wells Brown published Clotel, considered the first novel written by an African American.
Attentive to the struggles of his time, William Wells Brown not only dedicated his efforts to abolishing slavery but also supported white women’s struggle for the right to vote.
Solidarity and Resistance in St. Louis
Solidarity between African Americans and whites, following the example of William Wells Brown, would recur throughout St. Louis’s history, as in the famous Funsten Nut Strike of 1933, led by African American women. St. Louis was a major center for nut production and processing, due to the natural abundance of nuts along the Mississippi River valley and the ease of transportation via the river.
In the early 1930s, there were 16 nut-processing factories in St. Louis, seven of which belonged to the R. E. Funsten company. African American women workers earned less and worked longer hours than their white colleagues. Beginning in 1933, after several wage cuts, the women workers joined the local chapter of the U.S. Communist Party, which helped organize the strike.
Initially, only 900 African American women workers joined the strike, but by the second day, 200 white women workers had joined the movement—a historically significant step toward uniting African American and white workers.
Many historians consider the Funsten strike to be a precursor to the civil rights movements of the 1960s. It is important to note that this strike took place exactly ten years before filming began on Meet Me in St. Louis, which started in 1943. That isn’t all that long ago; many of the people involved in this strike were still working and living in St. Louis at the time the film was made.
One of the best books on the history of St. Louis is undoubtedly The Broken Heart of America – St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, by historian Walter Johnson, who wrote in this work:
“History in St. Louis unfolded at the juncture of racism and real estate, of the violent management of population and speculative valuation of property. The first to be forced out were Native Americans, who were pushed west and killed off by settlers and the US military. But in St. Louis the practices of removal and containment that developed out of the history of empire in the West were generalized into mechanisms for the dispossession and management of Black people within the city limits. And because removal is fundamentally about controlling the future, about determining what sorts of people will be allowed to live in what sorts of places, it is always concerned with the control of gender, sexuality, and reproduction; often women and children are singled out for particular sanction and targeted violence.”
Regarding St. Louis’s central role in U.S. history, Walter Johnson notes:
“From the Lewis and Clark expedition to the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014 and the launching of Black Lives Matter, many of the events that we consider central to the history of the United States occurred in St. Louis.”
And also:
“St. Louis has been the crucible of American history – that much of American history has unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-blackness in the city of St. Louis.”
Concluding:
“Genocide was the vanguard of the empire, and anti-Blackness followed immediately in the wake. (…) But western and anti-Blackness, the sort pioneered and promulgated in St. Louis, had as much to do with the model Indian removal and empire as it did with the exploitation of enslaved labor as it asserted its vision: there was no room at all for Black people – at least not free Black people – in the city of St. Louis.”
African Americans in St. Louis have a long history of resistance to the exclusionary and displacing practices of white supremacy. It is no coincidence that the 1887 St. Louis general strike was one of the first general strikes in the United States.
Some of the most important African American figures of the 20th century, such as Josephine Baker and Maya Angelou, were born in St. Louis, where they experienced the violence, struggle, and solidarity that would fuel their art, their thinking, and their actions.
Josephine Baker, already a famous artist during World War II, used her fame as a cover for her activities in support of the French Resistance fighting against the Nazi occupation. It was certainly in St. Louis that Josephine Baker learned to hate racism and to develop strategies for fighting the fascists.
Maya Angelou left a valuable account of racism and the struggle of African Americans in her autobiographies. Josephine Baker and Maya Angelou played an important role in organizing the civil rights movements in the U.S., part of the immense legacy of solidarity in the city of St. Louis.
White Supremacy and the Distortion of History
In 1915, coincidentally also during a war—in this case, World War I—the film The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith, premiered in the U.S. Considered a cinematic classic, it is an openly racist film, responsible in part for the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which is glorified in the film. At the time, the film sparked a wave of violence so extreme against African Americans that the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched nationwide protests in response to the racist stereotypes and historical distortions contained in the film. This reaction by the NAACP was one of the first national mobilizations in defense of African American civil rights organized in the U.S.
Meet Me in St. Louis is not a militant racist film like The Birth of a Nation, but the exclusion of African Americans from this film is a sign of white supremacy’s unease and its ability to exert influence even on something as seemingly harmless as the production of a musical.
The most problematic thing is that it seems—at least I haven’t found any—that there is no criticism of the fact that the St. Louis portrayed in the film is an entirely white city.
I believe that the vast majority of the film’s viewers, from its 1943 premiere to the present day, simply did not notice the absence of African Americans. This also does not seem to have been an issue for those who selected this film for preservation in the Library of Congress—and that was back in 1994! Further evidence of white supremacy’s ability not only to distort history but even to shape the very perception of reality!
An interesting and revealing example of historical distortion stemming from the exclusion of African Americans in the film is the iconic scene on a streetcar where Judy Garland sings “The Trolley Song.” According to Walter Johnson:
“Public conveyances, especially streetcars, were other defining sites of Black struggle in St. Louis. During the war (civil war) Blacks were banned from the inside of the cars, allowed only to ride exposed on open balconies at the front of the cars. (…) Beginning in 1865, Blacks on streetcars began to push their way inside, and in 1868 they won a judgement in circuit court allowing them to ride inside the covered cars.”
There are no African American passengers on the streetcar in this scene. The film is set between 1903 and 1904, but the reality depicted predates 1865.
However, Vincente Minnelli was not a racist like D. W. Griffith.
In 1943, shortly before Meet Me in St. Louis, Vincente Minnelli directed one of the first musicals with an all-African American cast, Cabin in the Sky.
Emanuel Levy, author of the biography Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer, wrote the following about this musical:
“In Cabin in the Sky, white characters not only are invisible, they’re irrelevant to the story. As Stephen Harvey observed, the degradation that whites have imposed on blacks are not even mentioned. Poverty is seen simply as a fact of life, passively accepted by the blacks. In fact, it was the absence of black anger in Cabin in the Sky that made it palatable to white audiences. For a country that was at war and needed to feel unified, it was comforting and reassuring that blacks (and other ethnic minorities) were ‘content’ with their lot. Nothing in the film suggested that blacks were kept in their place by the white majority.”
In order to make a musical film with an all-African-American cast, Minnelli had to bow to the mindset and conventions imposed by white supremacy at the time—an attitude completely different from that of D.W. Griffith, who chose to glorify the Ku Klux Klan.
I believe the same was true of Meet Me in St. Louis. According to Emanuel Levy, Minnelli wasn’t very interested in politics and was averse to conflict, but he wasn’t naive and knew full well what kind of society he lived in and what rules—explicit or implicit—he would have to follow if he wanted to make movies.
The condition imposed by the dominant white supremacist mindset for Meet Me in St. Louis to be, in the words of Arthur Freed “the most delightful piece of Americana ever”, was not only that it be the story of a “perfect and charming” white family, but also that no African Americans appear in the film. Vincente Minnelli certainly knew this, without anyone at MGM having to explicitly state this condition.
The Birth of a Nation is a piece of white supremacist propaganda
Meet Me in St. Louis shows us white supremacy at rest, content with itself. It is a celebration of white happiness and freedom. Without the presence of African Americans, white supremacy can set aside its militancy and devote itself to its pleasures and joys—to “normal” life. As TIME magazine put it, the film depicts a love story “between a happy family and a way of life,” yet this “way of life” excludes African Americans and Indigenous peoples. Behind its superficial charm lies the violence of white supremacy.
The Persistence of White Supremacy
More than 80 years after the opening of Meet Me in St. Louis, white supremacy in the U.S. continues to pursue its dream of control, exclusion, and hegemony.
The aforementioned book by Walter Johnson was published in 2020, and this passage can still be considered a description of St. Louis today:
“St. Louis today has the highest murder rate in the nation (65.8 per 100.000, around four times the rate in Chicago, and thirteenth-highest in the world) and the highest rate of police shootings in the nation (around 5 per 100,000). There is an eighteen-year difference in life expectancy between a child born to a family living in the almost completely Black Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood in North St. Louis and a child born to a family living in the majority-white suburb of Clayton, which lies less than ten miles to the west. Indeed, significant differences in virtually any marker of social well-being in the city of St. Louis – rates of adult diabetes or childhood asthma, levels of lead in the bloodstream, internet access – cab be charted down to a single line: Delamar Avenue, which bisects the city between north and south, between Black and white.”
These disparities in social well-being are not unique to St. Louis; they are found throughout the country.
One need only recall a few recent events in U.S. history:
– The 2008 housing crisis disproportionately affected African Americans.
U.S. banks and financial institutions directed predatory loans—with exorbitant interest rates, known as “subprime” loans—primarily toward minorities. Of the home loans granted to African American families, 53% were “subprime,” compared to 26% granted to white families. Consequently, about 8% of African American and Latino families lost their homes, compared to 4.5% of white families. Even more serious is the fact that, for the vast majority of African American families, home ownership represented the largest portion of their wealth—about 71%. For white families, this proportion was 51%. When the crisis hit, the wealth of affected white families fell by an average of 11%, while African American families lost nearly half of their accumulated wealth—about 47.6%—thereby virtually erasing all the economic progress achieved since the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.
-In 2014, for financial reasons, the Michigan state government decided to switch the city of Flint’s water supply to the Flint River.
However, the water from this river was highly corrosive, causing the old lead pipes to corrode and releasing enormous amounts of toxic lead into the water. This contamination disproportionately affected the African American community, which accounted for about 56% of the city’s population at the time of the crisis. The Flint case gained international notoriety as an example of environmental racism.
Cases like this occur when neoliberalism—as the white supremacy’s economic project of mass destruction is known—shapes public policy. Disregard for the environment and for the poorest and most vulnerable is intrinsic to white supremacy.
-Finally, the Trump administration, a completely white administration, consciously manipulates white supremacy for its own purposes. Under Trump, neocolonialism has gained new international momentum, and the war against the dark-skinned peoples of the Global South has intensified. The massacre of the Palestinian people continues with the tacit complicity of European white supremacy.
However, white supremacy today is no longer as relaxed, cheerful, and carefree as it was in the 1940s. Vincente Minnelli and MGM Studios could no longer pretend that African Americans did not exist. Movements such as Black Lives Matter demonstrate the strength of the African American community’s resistance.
The decline of the American empire, the military might of Russia and Iran, the rise of the BRICS, and above all, China’s spectacular economic growth—all pose powerful challenges to white supremacy and its dreams of hegemony, control, and exclusion.
Like the old lead pipes in Flint, white supremacy is being corroded from within by the waters of change. White supremacy today—stunned and taken by surprise—is cornered and knows it is rotting away; hence its violence. In its final hours, the desperation of white supremacy poses a real danger to the entire planet.
That is why the unity of the many colors and forms of knowledge of all the peoples of the world is now essential for the salvation of humanity and its common home, the Earth.
Franklin Frederick